I’m translating bit of this editorial by Guillaume Duval, from Alternatives Economiques (See https://www.alternatives-economiques.fr/guillaume-duval/super-macron/00091007). It is really good. It was written before neolib-ridden December, the […]

The two dominant factions among the country clubbers who lord it over the morlocks in the United States of Dreamland consist, on the one hand, of a rightwing group who spend a lot of time producing and decrying fake news, and a center-right group of Eloi who have produced a fake consensus history and spend a lot of time contrasting the present barbarians with the beautiful normality of once upon a time.The murder of 11 mostly elderly Jews in Pittsburgh has produced a lot of articles about how a

There’s a thing about living in France that always amazes some outward suburban zone of my American brain: I go into the store, I get checked out by the cashier, I pull out my credit card, I put it in the little credit card machine, and a word appears on the screen: Patientez.
Be patient. In the United States, when dealing with machines, the signs and recordings are rarely rooted in such a quasi-moral, such a Ciceronian admonition. Rather, they tell you that they are busy processing your informa

Roger Gathmann Mother Jones, a magazine that has taken up the mantra of tut-tutting neoliberalism and run with it, has published an article that claims that it is a “liberal fantasy” to think of impeaching Brett Kavanaugh. The writer of the piece is their correspondent for covering the court, Stephanie Mencimer, so presumably she knows what she is talking about. This is her “wake up to the coffee” graf:It’s never going to happen. If the Democrats can’t stop Kavanaugh’s confirmation in the Senate

THE SECOND IN OUR SERIES OF SUPREME COURT REJECTSOn December 5, 1970, the New Yorker published one of its then typical uberlong pieces, entitled Decision, by Richard Harris, under the Annals of Politics rubric. The article explores every nook and cranny of the dealing that went into the rejection of Nixon’s nomination of a Florida judge, G. Harrold, Carswell, for the Supreme Court post vacated by Abe Fortas. Harris later made the piece into a book entitled Decision. It was reviewed by William

Who will guard us from the guardians? “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” – this is a question posed by a satirist, Juvenal. It is funny, really: you would imagine that the question would first turn up in Plato or Aristotle, reach its canonical form there – that great rounded form of the thing finally said, as though the whole ocean of discourse had washed over it and worn away every unnecessary edge. But it does not crop up there, nor in Cicero, but in a poem directed against women. “I know the ad

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I am a translator, author and editor living in Paris. I finished a novel in March, and am busy trying to find an agent. In the meantime, I thought I'd like to start a magazine. Willett's is meant to be a venue for the review of books, personal reflections, and political bitching - and everything else.